Tragedy + Time = Comedy: the essential Stephanie Klein

Stephanie Klein

How had I lived so long and gone to so many writing conferences without running into blogger/memoirist/TV script writer Stephanie Klein, the petite New Yorker with a head of wild copper-colored curls who was the keynote speaker at the 2017 DFW WritersConference in Dallas. 

The popularity of her original blog, Greek Tragedy, focused on life after her divorce. Its popularity gained her the title “Internet Queen of Manhattan,” and led to the publication of her first book, Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir, about moving on after divorce. It was followed by a second book, Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp. A third memoir, about her too improbable to be fake stint as a Girl Scout leader in Texas, is in the works.

In this post, and especially for the benefit of those who already heard her conference speech, I’ll also include quotes from the conference’s “Book to Film” class whose speaker, Dallas film executive Will Evans, invited her to join him, as well as from her role as a panelist on “What Makes a Publishable Memoir.” (No, I have not been stalking Klein. How could you even think that? These were purely serendipitous occurrences!)

So, how does a magna cum laude graduate of Barnard College, who married the “mensch-nest door” move on after her perfect marriage came to a bitter end? Wildly. And detailed in detail on her blog.

(The popular post about the guy who was into Pam cooking spray – “and not because he wanted to cook me an egg” – had to be taken off before her first book came out. Who, her publisher asked, would pay money to read about it if they could see it for free on the internet? When asked, she first told the questioner in the audience “there’s a book in the lobby, it’s in chapter one.” In response to later questioning, she would only admit that it involved one person going north while the other was intent on going south. With cooking spray. Hopefully, no gorgeous auburn locks were injured in the process.)

That’s the kind of bone-deep honesty that she recommends for memoirists. Well, that and what she called “the observational stuff. . . what the artist notices that makes the good story. Not the expected, not the cliché.

“Don’t ask permission to tell the stories you need to tell. People will connect with you because you’re authentic and real. And not because of how promiscuous you are. The minute you fear what other people will say is the minute you become inauthentic.”

(She then confessed that even she thinks it’s a little weird that she dedicated the first book to her father. In answer to his hope that she “took a little poetic license” in her telling, she can only say, “OK, Dad, whatever let’s you sleep at night.”)

Her second book, Moose (“and not just Moose, but Moooose” as she heard in her school hallways), is the source of her equation: tragedy + time = comedy. (She confessed to recently taking a course in writing comedy, “which left me constipated,” but insisted she doesn’t try to sound funny, and it’s not her fault that people find her writing hilarious.)

Still, she’s happy to take the cash, including payment for writing the pilot for a TV series based on Straight Up and Dirty. She did, however, turn down a request to do a reality show of her life, which includes a new husband and twin children. A camera in the house? “Sounds like a recipe for a second divorce!”

See Klein’s site for more, including book excerpts, and musings on relationships, food, beauty, and parenting, where “Mother,” she says, is a verb.

(Tomorrow: author J.C. Davis’s tips on crafting fabulous first sentences for our own books, and a contest for those who dare to craft the truly awful.)

Wordcraft – What it means to be a literary good citizen

It was a first – the first visit to Dallas of the Writers' League of Texas, with a public panel discussion similar to those held monthly in its home base of Austin. The topic in this election year, when civic issues are on everyone’s mind: defining what it means to be a good citizen in the literary sense.

Judging from the enthusiasm of the crowd that filled the community room of Dallas’ Half Price Books main store on Northwest Highway, it should be the forerunner of many more such panels to come. WLT Executive Director Becka Oliver moderated an eclectic panel of four Dallas-area literary figures: Karen Blumenthal  (author, Tommy: The Gun That Changed America); Will Evans (publisher, Deep Vellum); Sanderia Faye (author, The Mourner’s Bench); and Jeramey Kraatz (author, The Cloak Society).

So what did they think being a literary citizen really means? What are the pathways to becoming a literary citizen? What are the ways of claiming and acting on that citizenship?

For a lot of writers who create alone, “being a literary citizen is like engaging with a community,” Evans said.

His literary journey began with the intention of becoming a writer. But it was discovering Russian literature in the original language in college – and realizing that he was able to translate books he wanted to read into English – that would move him from translating to engagement with the international literary community through his nonprofit press, Deep Vellum.

Blumenthal also found her definition of literary citizenship evolving. From a career as a journalist and nonfiction writer for adults, she became interested in nonfiction for children when one of her daughters became interested in the Great Depression, a subject with little representation on her school library shelves.

Public and school librarians have been enthusiastic supporters of Blumenthal’s work. Her volume Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition was one of School Library Journals Best Books of 2011. The support of libraries in turn influenced her to help, including organizing support for expanded hours fat Dallas’ public library system and for the upcoming April 30 Dallas Book Fair.

For further delving into that literary community, Blumenthal recommends organizations such as the SCBWI (Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators), which has a North Texas chapter, and PEN International. “And PEN Dallas,” Evans said. (He’s vice president of the Dallas chapter.)

Perhaps the most unlikely of journeys to literary citizenship was the one Faye took: as regional manager for Walmart, where she helped direct corporate giving to community organizations such as Dallas’ Tulisoma, the annual South Dallas Book Fair.

“I believe in supporting the artists financially,” she said, noting that as an author, even one with a book acclaimed by the likes of Dennis Lehane, “I work so many hours for zero dollars.”

Support can also be as simple as buying books, at readings as well as bookstores such as Deep Vellum’s, opening next month, as well as supporting the support systems of writers, such as libraries, recommended by both Blumenthal and Kraatz.

Add to that the act of writing reviews. And finally, social media.

“If it weren’t for social media, I don’t think anyone would know about Deep Vellum,” Evans said wryly (a position sure to change following this week’s very favorable review in The Dallas Morning News of his translation of Fardwor, Russia! by Oleg Kashin).

Wordcraft -- Hot off the presses -- live & local in Texas

The 2014 SMU LitFest opened last week to a full room in the DeGolyer Library as five local editors discussed the state of literary publishing in North Texas. The participants were Matthew Limpede, editor of Carve magazine; Will Evans of Deep Vellum, a press publishing English translations of foreign authors; Ronald E. Moore, a poet and composer whose Baskerville Publishers is expanding its repertoire from biographies of opera stars to poetry; Mark Allen Jenkins, editor of the newly renamed Reunion: The Dallas Review, arts and literature magazine of the University of Texas-Dallas; and Joe Milazzo, co-editor of the experimental literary journal (out of nothing).

Dallas Writer’s Garret co-founder Thea Temple opened the discussion with a question to the panel about the role of technology in the future of publishing. The revolutions spawned by the Internet, print on demand technology and electronic publishing, all agreed, have made a wider variety of literature available. But in themselves, these won’t keep small presses running unless they can provide the quality of writing communities of readers expect.

“We started (out of nothing) as an ezine because there was no overhead,” Milazzo said. “But that was not a good enough aesthetic reason.”

“When I took over Carve in 2007,” Limpede said, “I decided to go to a quarterly format,” seeking quality of writing over quantity. And although still publishing online, Carve has taken the retro-seeming step of publishing a paid subscription premium print edition with added content, in the hope of nurturing an emerging literary community. Make that, a twenty-first century print edition also available on iPad.

For Evans, whose Deep Vellum press is sponsored by the Writer’s Garret, being able to communicate with translators over the Internet has been key to his dream of establishing a Dallas-based literary press. “Previously, I would have had to make contacts at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Now, Frankfurt is a place to get together, after signing rights to texts. Independent publishers have much more power than they used to have.”

And what about the logistics of getting volumes printed and in customer’s hands, Temple asked?

Goodbye to the worries of not only publishing thousands of copies, but of finding warehouses to store them and locating distributors to get them into readers’ hands, Moore said, the worries that previously forced his Baskerville Publishers out of the literary fiction market. Now with print on demand publishing, he only needs to order copies he already has distribution orders for, enabling him to broaden his press’s niche.

So what does the future look like, Temple asked. How do small presses, which by definition don’t have larger readerships, expect to grow? And not only grow but engage in the larger issue of restoring reading as a respectable activity?

“We have to think about things like branding, aesthetics as much as text,” Limpede said. “Social media has turned out to be more powerful than I expected. Every press has to make their own definition of what’s okay for them.”

“What’s your definition?” Temple asked.

“For me, doing okay is getting my first book out,” Evans said.

“For us,” Limpede said, “okay (may) mean having a part time job, even a full time job, but it’s about finding your own community. For literature there’s no easy formula.”

“What ‘okay’ means,” Milazzo said, “has everything to do with readership. The reader completes the artistic endeavor.”

For more about reading--and writing--for these publishers, see http://carvezine.com/, www.baskervillepublishers.com/, www.outofnothing.org/, http://deepvellum.org/, and www.utdallas.edu/ah/reunion/.

Will Evans (l) & Matthew Limpede

(Next Monday, Dallas does readership, reaching every high school student--and more--during April’s Dallas Big Reads. But don’t wait until April 1--stay tuned for guerrilla early bird book distributions at local transit stations.)